La Fontanita, where I have been living for years now, used to be our ramshackle summer home in the blue mountains of the Ardeche. The centuries-old stone farm had been updated to a bare minimum, allowing our stay during summer holidays. But certainly not more than that, as I found out during my first cold winters, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

In my younger years I already loved being alone here in the wilderness, painting, writing, walking, or swimming, so it was not exceptional for me to find myself sleeping here all by myself, this warm August night full of stars, more than a decade ago. The huge sequoia tree that my father and I planted so many years ago, in front of my bedroom window, kept me in the shade on this moonlit knight. I woke in the middle of the night, around four o’clock, windows wide open, to the call of a little owl:

https://www.chant-oiseaux.fr/chouette-hulotte

At the same moment I heard a soft whisper:” This is where you belong!”

So I decided to change my life to come and live here. And to listen to that little voice, instead of smothering its message with layers and layers of logic. It took preparation of course, but one day I arrived in my old car, no job, with only 400 euros and this ardent desire to be here. It was an absolute leap of faith! Half of the roof was leaking, the house wasn’t isolated at all, so impossible to heat during the cold winters. After years of hard work and help from friends and government aids, it has now turned in my basic comfortable abode, with a guesthouse I rent out during the good season.

When I told this story about the little owl on my land to someone, this person correcte me: ” Not an owl on YOUR land, no, you were on HIS land.” True!